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Are the Roma Primitive, or Just Poor?

PARIS — THE cluster of Roma, handcuffed and caged-in behind glass walls, listened in silence as prosecutors accused them in court of selling child brides for up to about $270,000 in cash, valuing them based on their ability to steal. In a case that has riveted France, the prosecutors accused three family clans from Croatia of grooming girls and boys as young as 11 to steal as part of a gang that committed 100 robberies in France, Belgium and Germany in 2011.

One 20-year-old witness told the court he had stolen about $600,000 in cash and jewels for his parents, or more than $7,000 a month, since age 13. Less skilled thieves could face punishment, including beatings by Roma elders.

All but one of the 27 accused were convicted on Oct. 11 in Nancy, in eastern France, of forcing the children to steal, and received sentences from two to eight years. At the top of the network was a 66-year-old grandmother.

The case highlighted an increasingly rancorous debate here and across Europe about what some politicians call, rather ominously, the “Roma question,” a reference to the nomadic people, also known as Gypsies, who came from India to Europe centuries ago. An estimated 11 million are scattered across Europe.

This month’s trial only intensified that debate when members of the defense team offered an unusual legal defense: rather than focusing on the argument that the Roma are forced to resort to crime because of poverty and discrimination, it claimed that in some cases they were simply following age-old Roma traditions and generally operate outside the norms of society in “the style of the Middle Ages.”

In France, as elsewhere in Europe, the Roma issue is linked to difficult questions of ethnicity, race, social exclusion and political gamesmanship. Last week, highly publicized protests erupted in Paris and several other French cities following reports that police officers had detained a 15-year-old Roma girl in front of her school friends and deported her to Kosovo with her family, who had been living in the Doubs region of eastern France as illegal immigrants for five years. The government has pledged to investigate the circumstances of their expulsion.

Last month, the interior minister, Manuel Valls, a Socialist, caused a furor by saying only a minority of Roma could fit into French society, implicitly suggesting they should leave. Many of the country’s roughly 20,000 noncitizen Roma from Romania and Bulgaria live in squalid encampments on the outskirts of French cities.

The far right National Front has warned of Roma flooding the country and has made them a key issue in advance of municipal elections in March. This summer, its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, called the Roma community in Nice “smelly” and “rash-inducing.”

In the Marais district of Paris, where young Roma gangs brazenly target tourists and locals at metros and bank machines, one pregnant girl said begging was her only lifeline. “We have no papers, we can’t work, what else are we supposed to do?” she asked, hastily adding: “We are Europeans, too."

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Against this volatile backdrop, the defense offered in the case in Nancy was particularly striking.

“It is very difficult to interpret their behavior based on our own 20th-century standards,” Alain Behr, a defense lawyer who represented two of the accused clan chiefs, explained by telephone from Nancy. “This community crosses time and space with its traditions, and we in Europe have trouble to integrate them. Yet they have preserved their tradition, which is one of survival.”

While not condoning the thievery, Mr. Behr said that what prosecutors had characterized as the practice of selling child brides was, in fact, part of a centuries-old tradition of Roma dowry.

But Gregory Weill, the prosecutor, dismissed cultural explanations. He noted that when investigators descended on the ringleaders’ hometown in Croatia, they discovered the family’s imposing marble houses. In the clan’s caravans in northern France, he said, police officers found Mercedeses, Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and Louis Vuitton purses.

Using wiretaps, he said, they uncovered a highly organized operation deploying children as thieves to avoid prosecution as adults. Mobile phones were discarded to cover their tracks, and fences were used to transfer stolen jewelry into cash.

“Someone in the Middle Ages would not be able to launder money amassed by children,” he said. “They may have grown up in Eastern Europe. But they perfectly understood Western values. They were criminals.”

Livia Jaroka, a Hungarian anthropologist who has studied the Roma and is the only Roma member of the European Parliament, maintains that decades of discrimination have resulted in endemic unemployment, extreme poverty, low education levels, segregated housing, human trafficking, substance abuse and high mortality rates. She argues that assimilation into Western European culture does not require abandoning Roma traditions as much as overcoming age-old stereotypes and investing in education, jobs and health care.

“The cultural explanation for Roma criminality is nonsense,” she said in an interview. “It is about economics.”

But critics counter that rights come with responsibilities and that throwing money at the Roma is futile, unless they fully commit to integration.

One glimmer of hope is in Spain, which has some 750,000 Roma, nearly half under 25. Nearly all Roma children there finish primary school, according to the Fundació Secretariado Gitano, a Madrid-based foundation, though only a small minority finish high school. In 1978, three-quarters of Spain’s Roma lived in substandard housing; today just 12 percent do. Isidro Rodriguez, the foundation’s director, cited access to free education, health care and social housing following the anti-Roma repression of the Franco years.

Ms. Jaroka, who grew up in a poor community of Roma musicians in Tata, in Hungary, said she owed her success to her parents, a waiter and dressmaker, who insisted that she, her sister and her brother get an education in unsegregated schools. Today, her sister is a music therapist; her brother, a soccer coach.

“We Roma,” she said, “also need to learn to emancipate ourselves.”

Dan Bilefsky is a Paris-based reporter for The New York Times.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on October 20, 2013, on Page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Are the Roma Primitive, or Just Poor?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe